‘The Day He Arrives’ Directed by Hong Sang-soo

The Day He Arrives

Yu Jun-sang and Kim Bo-kyung in "The Day He Arrives."Credit
Cinema Guild

At once direct and elusive, “The Day He Arrives” is a story about what might have been or perhaps once was. It pivots on a teacher and lapsed film director, Seong-jun (Yu Jun-sang), who, when the movie opens, has just arrived in Seoul. He’s in town to see a friend, but there’s something rootless and sad about him, suggesting that he’s after more than a visit. As one day gives way to another — days that look remarkably the same — his visit takes on existential weight, and the movie becomes an exploration, both playful and rueful, of desire, narrative and the idea beautifully expressed by Faulkner in “Absalom, Absalom!” that “maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished.”

When you first see Seong-jun he’s wandering around and pondering his plans in voice-over. “I have nowhere to go,” he says, shortly before watching a man and woman walking side by side in the opposite direction, an image that telegraphs togetherness and aloneness. The sharp black-and-white digital cinematography feels as stark as his isolation. Soon, though, he runs into an actress he once worked with and who’s the first of several reminders of his life as a director. She seems eager to talk and says that she has recently finished a play called “Opening.” By contrast he appears ill at ease, perhaps because she reminds him of his past. Rejecting her opening, as it were, he leaves.

His next stop is a restaurant where three film students invite him to join them. (One apologizes for not recognizing him.) Because this is a movie from the prolific South Korean director Hong Sang-soo, the characters drink and talk, and then they drink and talk some more. When night falls, Seong-jun’s friendliness dissolves and, after yelling at the students (“Stop copying me!”), he literally runs off. He ends up at the home of a former lover, Kyung-jin (Kim Bo-kyung), who’s reluctant to let him enter. But she relents, and before long he’s weeping in her lap, and the two are, in a signature Hong image, fumbling at each other’s bodies with exquisitely painful awkwardness. The next morning they affirm their feelings for each other even as they agree that this is goodbye.

For a man who has just arrived Seong-jun seems like a man in flight, a theme that deepens when, that same morning, he again runs into the actress and again hurries off before meeting his friend Young-ho (Kim Sang-joong). That night the two men and a woman, a film professor, Bo-ram (Song Sun-mi), end up at a small bar called Novel, a nod, perhaps, to the formal experimentations of this movie’s modernist antecedents. The absent bar owner later rushes in and turns out to be a woman, Ye-jeon. “She looks exactly like her!” Seong-jun exclaims in voice-over without saying who “her” is, a gently comic moment because the “she” is played by the same actress who plays his former lover.

If you’re not paying strict attention, it’s possible to miss that one actress is playing two women, both because the characters are dressed and styled differently and because this doubling is unexpected, especially given the movie’s realism. The doubling, however, marks the point at which “The Day He Arrives” feels as if it’s slipping into another register, a different realism — subjective rather than nominally objective — and what seemed like coincidences and chance repetitions (Seong-jun’s meeting of the actress, the different goodbyes) appear to be forming a pattern. That night at the bar Seong-jun drinks, plays the piano and wonders about Ye-jeon. This won’t be their sole encounter: the next evening (or maybe not) he’s back at Novel, again meeting Ye-jeon and playing the piano.

As in Alain Resnais’s “Last Year at Marienbad,” another movie in which the past collides with the present, repetition is both a theme and a narrative device in “The Day He Arrives.” In “Marienbad” the repetitions, like the recurring traveling shots through all the corridors, salons and galleries, visually express the characters’ mental reality. The repetitions in “The Day He Arrives” — Seong-jun’s circular wandering, his encounters with the actress, the farewells — similarly visualize his thought processes and express what he doesn’t say or says only obliquely. Again and again his past intrudes on his present, in the students who are also emblems of his own youth, in the actress he once worked with (an actor pops up too) and in the bar owner who resembles his old lover.

Mr. Hong, whose films include “Turning Gate,” handles all this with a deceptively casual touch, humor and his customary lack of visual fuss, initially calling attention to his presence only with a periodic, punctuating pan or zoom. His characters wallow, but he doesn’t, and his film feels as light as “Marienbad” feels heavy. “The Day He Arrives” has real force and its experimentation is in the service of a moving story about a man who, as he says at the start, has nowhere to go. And so he returns to a bar, a woman and situations that are always the same and yet always different — snow falls during one kiss but not another — playing a director whose life resembles a movie he keeps remaking.